Sunday School

Have a great week everyone!!

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”

– George Eliot

Sorry for the late edition today. I am tra…[Read more]

Reg, I have. And I was in fact moved to wonderment over the life cycle of a slug. I think it’s page 79 or around there. Astonishing.

With Simon Paynton on the word tool:

By this, I mean something we can use for our betterment or more flourishing.

I agree completely about tools for particpating at floursihing and the word appreciating is also used by some. I can understand something about betterment when aware to better society where there are people not understanding their…[Read more]

A tool

By this, I mean something we can use for our betterment or more flourishing.

@allandone

Mysticism, christian and jewish is not interested in complete understanding by definition. To say that nothing is understandable completely, which is what mysticism does, is to opt of of peace and then as a aconsequence wisdom.

I agree that the very name, mysticism, implies something that cannot be known.  I think it is very beneficial…[Read more]

human violence (or warfare)

Chimpanzees do the same thing: form coalitions that compete with other coalitions.

Martin Seligman

I think it’s valid to introduce mysticism into this area of positive psychology, since the pressure to thrive is functionally equivalent to “God’s unconditional love”.  But I can understand if it freaks people out that a church has got involved.

We are certainly less violent than our primate relatives.  There is good evidence to suggest that there was no warfare, and very little violence, in humans before the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

I think the key to understanding human violence (or warfare) is our peculiar combination of cooperation and competition (i.e. we cooperate…[Read more]

@Strega, You have probably read his “A short history of nearly everything”  which is great to dip in and out off.

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Thanks All and One. Welcome to Atheist Zone.

The reason we are a violent species (by nature) is not because we are “humans” but because we are mammals. There is plenty of evidence to back this up. I will see if I can get references for it but here is a starting point.

Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago.

There’s little reason to think that early Homo sapiens were less territorial, less violent, less intolerant – less human.

Optimists have painted early hunter-gatherers as peaceful, noble savages, and have argued that our culture, not our nature, creates violence. But field studies, his…

[Read more]

On morality and religious progressivism.

People want to understand something completely and particiate in something continuable.  The interest is in appreciating our circumstance and being understood. People who are difficult are divorcing themselves from what can be continued and added to with this being necessary to move certain sights and…[Read more]